Reliable Multicast Congestion Control (rmcc)

At present, there are no standardized, Internet-based multicast transport protocols that provide effective, dynamic congestion control methods for safe, widescale deployment of end-to-end rate adaptive applications (e.g., file transfer). Recent research and standardization efforts are beginning to address these issues. This paper describes ongoing research and development related to network congestion control mechanisms for multicast data transport. We concentrate on the design issues for reliable multicast protocols in particular and we describe our approach for adding dynamic congestion control to a negativeacknowledgement oriented protocol. We also present simulation and modeling results demonstrating prototype system performance, including analysis of TCP fairness and router congestion indicators. We also relate our work to other ongoing research and standards development efforts.